


Shed As Water

by rlucine



Series: The Space Between [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bathing/Washing, Character Study, Explicit Consent, F/F, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Major Character Injury, Mutual Masturbation, Post-Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-04-24 08:54:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22183273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rlucine/pseuds/rlucine
Summary: Dorothea and Bernadetta wash each other in the aftermath of a brutal, pointless battle.
Relationships: Dorothea Arnault/Bernadetta von Varley
Series: The Space Between [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1615993
Comments: 4
Kudos: 63





	Shed As Water

**Author's Note:**

> There's some kind of nasty descriptions of battle so I'm flagging this just to be safe.
> 
> I'm still stuck in rarepair hell with these two but I'm doing my best.

In battle, Dorothea's eyes share the lightning in her hands, as if all the rage in the sky were channeled into the form of a woman. Rain turns to steam as it strikes her fingers, destroyed in a quiet hiss. There is no room for grace in war — all that remains are black tangles of fiber and charred flesh; the stench muted into mud. Bernadetta shakes water out of her eyelashes; swallows down nausea to soothe her panicking heart.

When Bernadetta was seven, her father took her to see an opera. Bernadetta doesn't remember the title or the context, but she remembers how the knights died in swirls of red ribbon, how each man spoke softly before he breathed his last, and how Bernadetta screamed as if the scene were horrifying.

Bernadetta doesn't cry about death anymore. On the battlefield, bodies are just bodies, and the ribbon is wet and pungent and seeps so far into Bernadetta's clothes that the fabric becomes an extension of her heart.

Bernadetta holds her bow and five arrows in her left hand. She draws and shoots with her right, then scrambles across the cobblestone to shelter underneath a fallen rooftop, scraping water from her eyes with a muddy wrist. The empire soldiers are dark smudges in the downpour, with only the occasional flash of lightning to reveal their shape and formation. Bernadetta screams, because that is how bodies communicate in war, and Dorothea sprints, slides through mud until they are slumped together between shattered wood and plaster.

"They're everywhere," Bernadetta gasps, through the roar of battle.

"Thin the alley," Dorothea says. It's an instruction to kill, but Bernadetta doesn't think about it, she just does. Fills her fists with arrows and forgets them in the night.

Dorothea fires a bolt of electricity into a nearby house, yielding an explosion of splinters. The spell knocks the air out of Bernadetta's lungs, and Dorothea recoils in pain, but it needed to happen. The war needed to happen, and the battle needed to happen. Bernadetta needs another arrow so she pulls one out of a body and fires it anew, slices another out of the air with her hand and returns it to the shooter.

"Don't pull that out," Dorothea says, with her ragged voice, the one that proves she isn't in her body. Bernadetta has apparently been shot. She rips the arrow out of her own thigh anyway; fires it true. Stops thinking.

Bernadetta is just a machine, now, limping in mud and lies and her own self-deceit. She loses herself. The war is cruel; the world is ending, and Bernadetta is finally, quietly, insane.

* * *

Bernadetta is in the medical wagon. The rain, lighter now, flecks against the outside of the canvas and soaks through in rivulets around the frame. Bernadetta wonders if the storm bled itself out like the battlefield or if Dorothea just scared it away.

Dorothea bottled her emotions up. Whenever she drank alcohol the bottle would drink pain out of her and after the exchange was complete she'd throw the bottle away and remember how to laugh. That's how it was supposed to work, anyway. Right now, Dorothea is asleep on the floor of the wagon with her hands covered in dried blood and a peaceful expression on her face. Dorothea's face remembered how to smile even when the rest of her didn't. They were both grateful for that.

Bernadetta doesn't sleep. She stares up at the underside of the wagon cover, as if her eyes could poke two new stars into the sky, or slash the darkness apart if she dared try.

Bernadetta's grandmother once told her that every star in the sky was the soul of a person who died. Bernadetta thinks that's wrong because people's souls don't go up when they die, they just spread out over the landscape or sink straight down into the earth like arrows. If death created new stars then the night would gradually get brighter until nobody could sleep. That wasn't how it worked. Things just end.

* * *

It snows by the time the convoy ends at Garreg Mach. The wagon wheels dig wet ruts into the white landscape and Bernadetta is cold, so Dorothea throws a blanket over Bernadetta's shoulders as she limps back to her room. Her wounds are bandaged now, but her body is still tender and stinging.

Dorothea finds herself in Bernadetta's room. Bernadetta can tell because Dorothea starts breathing and laughing, like she doesn't understand how else to react.

"Can't believe we almost died," Dorothea says, and stifles a giggle.

Bernadetta nods. She's probably supposed to be exhausted but instead she doesn't feel anything. All she can do is look at Dorothea with a face that intends to say _I know_.

Bernadetta is still wearing her combat gear, but she moves to collapse down in her bed.

"You should take those off," Dorothea says, and Bernadetta hesitates.

"Do you really think so?" Bernadetta stutters.

"Bern, you're covered in dirt, and - and blood."

"Oh," Bernadetta says.

"C'mon," Dorothea says. "I'll help clean you up."

* * *

Bernadetta hasn't taken anything off by the time Dorothea returns with towels and hot water. Dorothea gives an inquisitive look and says, "So, is this really okay?"

"Oh, yeah. Yes."

"Bern, it was really fucked up out there and I know we sometimes both say yes out of convenience. So—"

"I know," Bernadetta whispers. "And I want you to, um... I don't want to be alone. So, yes. I can do you, too."

Dorothea giggles and sits down on the floor, and Bernadetta takes layer after layer off until she's left in just her smalls for modesty. She discards the rest of her clothes next to the door in an indistinguishable heap of earth.

Dorothea taps the clasp of Bernadetta's bra. "You can also..."

"Maybe later," Bernadetta says, too tired not to be sincere.

Bernadetta's skin is a patchwork of dirt dried in the impression of her outer clothing, and as the bathwater runs brown all of her bones and scars and improbable amount of sinew become visible. She feels Dorothea's breath sensitive against her wet skin and shivers, probably because it's cold outside. There wasn't much point to keeping the bra on because everything is visible anyway.

Bernadetta catches Dorothea's hand and holds it around herself. "Um, could you..."

Whenever Bernadetta was inconsolable, her grandmother would wrap Bernadetta in blankets until she couldn't sit up. The weight and the warmth and the closeness meant that her room was safe, and Bernadetta would lie there, looking sideways at the woman who somehow gave birth to Bernadetta's father, breathing valiantly against the weight of it all.

Bernadetta finds herself in Dorothea's arms. Dorothea presses the side of her face into Bernadetta's neck, and Bernadetta becomes aware that her own body is still just a bag of really pointy bones, but Dorothea apparently doesn't notice. They are allowing themselves to cry. Bernadetta doesn't mind. She hugs back.

* * *

Bernadetta's skin is clean, although Bernadetta herself doesn't _feel_ clean. She turns to Dorothea and all her words catch in her throat, like what happens to rivers when there's too much debris in the way and no water can get through. Dorothea is also looking at Bernadetta, which is overwhelming, so Bernadetta watches her candle drip wax onto her desk. The candle isn't supposed to be doing that, so she must have set it up wrong, but it doesn't really matter.

"My turn?" Dorothea says, and Bernadetta nods. Dorothea sheds her combat dress like a husk, clumsy, in sweeps of mud-drenched fabric. She has old lightning scars all the way up her right arm, cupping the shoulder like a hand before they miss her heart and escape out her left leg.

"Let me know if this hurts, okay?" Bernadetta says. She can't seem to steady the tremble in both hands as she wets a towel and wrings it damp.

"It's no worry. I'm tougher than I look," Dorothea says.

When Dorothea undoes her chest wrap, Bernadetta forgets how to breathe. Dorothea definitely notices, but she just watches as Bernadetta hesitates and un-hesitates until the white towels are smeared dark, and they are both covered in goosebumps.

Bernadetta looks Dorothea in the eye, testing. Looks away and then looks back again.

"Do it," Dorothea says.

Bernadetta wonders if she should feign ignorance, but Dorothea's eyes are determined and open and Bernadetta is braver than she's ever been before. Bernadetta leans up and kisses her. It tastes like spit. Dorothea kisses back with her whole body, and she doesn't let go.

"This isn't how I expected my night to go, to be honest," Dorothea says.

Bernadetta looks sideways at the bedpost. Dorothea, consoling, reaches her good hand out and brushes Bernadetta's hair behind her ear.

"You can stare," Dorothea says, so Bernadetta hesitantly does. She takes in every color in Dorothea's eyes, every eyelash, every peach hair on her skin, and it's overwhelming — how Dorothea is real, and alive; glowing; not even a figment of Bernadetta's imagination.

"Again," Dorothea says, so Bernadetta kisses harder. She loses herself then, finds herself on the other side of the bed drenched in sweat.

"How far does this go," Dorothea breathes.

"Just ask," Bernadetta says.

"Can I," Dorothea says, with a hand poised above Bernadetta's chest.

Bernadetta doesn't bother responding; she takes Dorothea's hand and pushes it under her bra. The hand is rough, skin burned and patterned with scars, but the touch is soft, trembling, gentle: a leaf in the wind. Bernadetta's breath catches in her throat. Their eye contact doesn't break, not even when Bernadetta lets Dorothea use her mouth, not even when her chest is covered in spit.

"Can I," Dorothea says with her hand dangerously lower.

Bernadetta smiles. "Um, I'd rather do that myself. I —"

"Shh," Dorothea whispers. "You don't need to explain."

"No, I mean, can we?"

Dorothea's eyes widen, and she nods. Her voice is already a shudder, a ghost of stability, and when she finally moans, Bernadetta wants nothing more than to fall apart in her arms. Breathing becomes a dance, a confluence of touch and smell and confidence and can-I's and yeses and Bernadetta can't believe what's actually happening, so she doesn't, and keeps going.

"I can feel—" Dorothea gasps, "—how fast your heart is beating."

Bernadetta wraps her legs into Dorothea's, knows that Dorothea can feel every time Bernadetta touches herself, moans because she needs to. Kisses again because she can.

"I'm —" Dorothea says, and pulls Bernadetta close enough to touch foreheads. Bernadetta's eyes are wide and curious, and Dorothea says "Come with me, come with me, come with me," so Bernadetta does, loses her orgasm in another kiss and gets it back again, like lightning, like all the stars in the sky; or, just the quiet breath of a woman.

* * *

Bernadetta doesn't sleep, but she still wakes up with an arrow in her right hand and her bow in the other.

Dorothea drools in her sleep and it's kind of disgusting, but Bernadetta doesn't care. She pushes Dorothea's hair behind her ear and stares at the ceiling for too long.

Everything is still real in the morning.

"Thank you," Bernadetta says.

"For what?" Dorothea says.

"Being there. Helping. Trying."

Dorothea's eyes soften. "You deserve it."

Bernadetta leans her head against Dorothea's shoulder. "You deserve it, too."

"You saved me out there."

"_You_ saved _me_ out there."

"And we survived. Again."

Bernadetta smiles. "Yeah. We did."

**Author's Note:**

> Ok so there is so much _fluid_ in this story and I didn't even want this to happen, but, uhh... Take a shot every time I mention a new one?


End file.
